Gartner: 80% of commercial apps to use open source by 2012

Analysts at Gartner predict that open-source software components will be …

Research firm Gartner believes that 80 percent of all commercial software applications will include open-source components by 2012. Gartner notes that the value and robustness of open-source software offers compelling opportunities for commercial software developers to reduce development costs. This prediction was included in a collection of educated guesses published by the company late last month in an effort to provide insight into possible trends for the coming years.

"By 2012, 80 per cent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology," Gartner wrote in a report. "Many open-source technologies are mature, stable and well supported. They provide significant opportunities for vendors and users to lower their total cost of ownership and increase returns on investment. Ignoring this will put companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. Embedded open-source strategies will become the minimal level of investment that most large software vendors will find necessary to maintain competitive advantages during the next five years."

Open-source technologies are already broadly used across the entire spectrum of the software industry, which means that Gartner's guess looks like a safe bet. The research firm is primarily referring to developer-oriented software components that are distributed under permissive open-source licenses—such as the BSD license and GNU's Lesser General Public License (LGPL)—that broadly permit inclusion of licensed source code in proprietary software and do not mandate the broad reciprocity requirements that are found in popular copyleft open-source licenses like the regular General Public License.

Commercial software developers often adopt permissively-licensed open-source software components and include them in their own applications to reduce development time. Some open-source implementations of commonly-used technologies are so widely adopted in commercial software applications that they have nearly become de facto industry standards. A few examples include the zlib data compression library, the OpenSSL secure sockets layer library, and the Boost C++ libraries. These open-source technologies can be found in mainstream commercial software applications developed by a wide range of well-known companies, like Adobe, Real Networks, McAfee, and many others. Some proprietary software application developers are also embedding or building on top of open-source runtime engines like XULRunner, and Mono (for those who are curious: Joost uses XULRunner and Linden Lab is adopting Mono for the next generation scripting engine in Second Life).